Why Is It … ?

Why is it that the Feds can go after online gambling, but not one person in the international banking scandal that brought down half the world's economies is even being investigated?

Don't get me wrong. I'm no friend of online gambling. I don't even support the idea of state run lotteries. But come on, folks, nothing has been more criminal in the area of economics than the banking scandals, and there isn't even one case being investigated?

One is left to suppose that if banks are too important to fail bankers are too important to charge when they commit criminal behavior. Important how? Because they contribute too much money to politicians?

We had no trouble going after the criminals in the savings and loan fiasco twenty years ago. Why not now?

Obama To Battle Banks Over Student Loan Business:

President Obama is setting out to attack the student loan business that has placed American youth into perpetual debt. Half of young people are going to college and most of them have been going deeply into debt to the failed American banking system for ten to twenty years of their working lives.

For a number of years now, the cost of higher education has been rising at a rate not only faster than inflation but faster even than the spiraling cost of health care. Under the Bush administration, the cost was shifted from tax payers onto the backs of the young people who were attending college with the beneficiaries being the banking industry. Instead of grants, students are given loans with government guarantees so that even if the students couldn't pay the loans back, the taxpayers would.

In other words, the very people whom the shift was ostensibly intended to help were not receiving that aid. The banking industry was. With interest. Thus driving the actual cost of education even higher.

Now not only are the colleges and universities benefiting from the increased and opaque funding of higher education, but so are the banks, thus helping to fuel the wild and irresponsible speculation that industry was involved in for the past decade. (See The New York Times' story.)

By the way, the Bush family has deep ties with the banking industry.